company with whom he wandered about for fourteen weeks in the depth of winter, "not knowing what bread or bed did mean." He wrote letters of admonition to all the Churches whereof any of the magistrates were members, inciting them to admonish the magistrates of their injustice. This was the breaking point of the strain. between Williams and the Churches themselves; they could not justify his recusant and impenitent attitude. His own wife was constrained to set herself in opposition to him. Often in the stormy night he had neither fire nor food nor company; often he wandered without a guide, and had no house but a hollow tree; but his unconquerable spirit, winsomeness of disposition, power of inspiring others with affection and trust, stood him in good stead. He grappled to himself the hearts of the Indians as with hooks of steel. "God," he says, " was pleased to give me a painful, patient spirit to lodge with them in their filthy smoky holes (even while I lived at Plymouth and Salem), to gain their tongue." "The barbarous heart of Canonicus, the chief of the Narragansetts, loved him as his son to the last gasp." He said: "The ravens fed me in the wilderness." "That ever-honoured Governor Winthrop privately wrote to me to steer my course to the Narragansett Bay, encouraging me from the freeness of the place from English claims or patents. I took his prudent motion as a voice from God." To this bay Williams and his family, with five other companions, steered their course. They landed in Rhode Island in June 1636, and Williams named the spot at which they landed "Providence," for, he said, "I desired it might be a shelter for persons distressed for conscience." Such was the foundation of

the town of Providence, such the beginning of the settlement of Rhode Island. With the utmost cordiality and goodwill the Narragansett Indians ceded to him the extensive territory in the midst of which he had made his home, and so confirmed him in possession of it that, as he says, he could claim the soil as "his own as truly as any man's coat upon his back." Here at once was to be tried the experiment of setting up a democracy of the most thoroughgoing type. Something like a community of goods was at once established. Williams reserved to himself not one foot of land, not one tittle of political power more than he granted to servants and strangers. 'He gave away his lands and other estate to them that he thought were most in want, until he gave them away all." As Professor Masson observes, it was probably the most absolutely democratic community on the whole face of the earth. But if it was a democracy, it was also a theocracy, for it was laid down from the beginning that God was their King, the ruler of conscience to be implicitly obeyed, "only in civil things" were they free to frame their own laws and regulations.

Though Williams had stoutly protested against the injustice of his being banished from Massachusetts, though he had undergone untold hardships, and was still under the sentence of outlawry, not the least feeling of resentment or ill-will towards those who had been the means of inflicting this suffering upon him found place in his large and generous heart. "I did ever, from my soul, honour, love them, even when their judgment led them to afflict me." Many hearts in Massachusetts were stirred with relentings at the exhibition of such unruffled patien ce

and sweetness.

"That great and pious soul, Mr. Winslow, melted, and kindly visited me, and put a piece of gold into the hands of my wife for our supply."

Williams was at once the founder of the new settlement and its pastor and teacher. Surrounded by congenial associates, and strong in his own religious principles and rectitude of purpose, he set to work to complete the hard task he had taken in hand. It might have been supposed that the work of organising the small community, as well as of sowing broadcast the seed of the new faith in the new country, would have consumed all his energies; especially when to this was added the necessity of labouring for the maintenance of his family, for, as he says: "Time was spent day and night, at home and abroad, on land and water, at the hoe and at the oar, for bread." But there was another difficulty, not less formidable that it was of his own creating. Williams had a very clamant and pertinacious creditor to satisfy in the shape of his own conscience. It was all he could do to keep pace with its requirements. Three years after his settlement in Rhode Island we hear of his having embraced Baptist principles, and with a consistency from which he never shrank, he induced a poor man, who, like himself, had come all the way from Salem, to baptize him; then he baptized his baptizer, along with ten others, thus founding what was practically the first Baptist Church in America.

This was a great scandal to the Church at Salem, of which Williams and his wife were still nominally members, and at the instance of its new pastor, Hugh Peters, the Church solemnly deposed them, along with others, from its membership. Even then, Williams could not

satisfy that uneasy and clamorous conscience of his, that he had a right to be baptized, and that even if he had, that the administration of baptism was valid, and in accordance with the will of God. This raised in Williams' mind the whole question of Church order and Church ordinances. Was there divine authority for any of them? Was not the God who spake to Abraham and Saul of Tarsus calling him to cut himself adrift from external forms, and cast himself upon the unmediated revelation and teaching of God Himself?1 "Let the reader

fancy him," says Professor Masson, "in 1640, a man of thirty-four, of bold and stout jaw, but with richest and softest eyes, gazing out upon Narragansett Bay, a spiritual Crusoe, the excommunicated even of Hugh Peters, and the most extreme and outcast soul in all America." 2

It does not fall within the scope of our purpose to relate the history of Roger Williams. This has been abundantly done by others. All we are endeavouring to do is to indicate his position in the New England theocracy, and the religious and political developments to which his influence so powerfully contributed. We pass over his visit to England in 1643, when he made the acquaintance of Milton, and became intimate with the leading divines of the Westminster Assembly; simply noting how he threw himself with characteristic vehem

1 In his fiery and polemical tract, George Fox digged out of his Burrowes, written many years after, in 1676, he says: "I profess that if my soul could find rest in joining unto any of the Churches professing Christ Jesus now extant, I would readily and gladly do it, yea, unto themselves whom I now opposed."

2 Masson's Life of John Milton and History of his Time, vol. ii. p. 563.

ence into the controversy which was then raging round the question of toleration, and wrote his famous tract, entitled, The Bloody Tenet of Persecution for cause of Conscience discussed in a Conference between Truth and Peace. The tract was a most forcible plea for unlimited toleration, a toleration which should embrace all sects and all opinions Papists and Jews, Mohammedans, Pagans, and Infidels. Yet he was well aware of the hopelessness of his task, for he writes: "I confess I have little hope till these flames are over that this discourse against the doctrine of persecution for cause of conscience should pass current, I say not amongst the wolves and lions, but even among the sheep of Christ themselves. Yet liberavi animam meam. I have not hid within my breast my soul's belief."

Professor Masson designates Roger Williams as the father and apostle of what, since his time, has figured anywhere in Great Britain, or in the United States, or in the British Colonies, under the name of Voluntaryism. Says the eloquent historian of the United States, he was the first person in modern Christendom to assert in its plenitude the doctrine of the liberty of conscience, the equality of opinions before the law; and in its defence he was the harbinger of Milton, the precursor and the superior of Jeremy Taylor. For Taylor limited his toleration to a few Christian sects; the philanthropy of Williams compassed the earth.1 Williams would permit persecution of no opinion, of no religion, leaving heresy unharmed by law and unprotected by the terrors of penal statutes. He believed in liberty and equality, as he believed in

1 History of the United States, revised edition, vol. i. p. 298.